SPECIAL EPISODE: Justice Alito Let's His Appeal to Heaven Flag Fly
In light of the news that Justice Alito flies an Appeal to Heaven flag over his beach house, Brad speaks to four experts on what it means and why it's a truly significant moment in the life of SCOTUS.
Dr. Matthew Taylor, author of the Violent Take It By Force: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506497785/The-Violent-Take-It-by-Force
Annika Brockschmidt, journalist, author: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Annika-Brockschmidt/author/B06XH8QPWM?ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
Andrew Seidel, constitutional lawyer and author of American Crusade: https://www.unionsquareandco.com/9781454943921/american-crusade-by-andrew-l-seidel/
Rev. Angela Denker, writer and pastor - author of Red State Christians: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9781506482507/Red-State-Christians
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Axis Mundy Flying the appeal to heaven flag is sort of like a secret handshake for Christian nationalists.
It's a way for one Christian nationalist to recognize another, for a public official who is a Christian nationalist to publicly declare their affiliation, their faith in the Christian nationalist movement, but doing so in a way that gives them plausible deniability.
By now you've heard that Samuel Leto was flying an Appeal to Heaven flag outside of his summer residence.
This coming in the wake of news that he, or at least he claims his wife, flew an upside-down American flag in a feud with neighbors outside their main residence.
Last night on MSNBC, Chris Hayes provided context on why this is such a big deal with an assist from none other than yours truly.
He's got the flag in his Google Street View, folks!
That right there is the Google image from the August of 2023.
Okay, so the Appeal to Heaven flag recently gained some notoriety because it also hangs out the office of the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.
You see it there on the right.
Now, it's been around since revolutionary times, but over the past decade or so specifically, it has grown closely associated with the Christian nationalist movement, including as the title of a book by a guy named Dutch Sheets.
He's a Trump supporter, an election denier, one of the most influential Christian nationalists in the country.
As one former Christian nationalist told PBS early this year, he helped turn the flag into a rallying symbol among right-wing groups in this country.
The Appeal to Heaven flag goes back to the Revolutionary War, George Washington.
It was inspired by John Locke.
But over the last 10 years, the Appeal to Heaven flag has been popularized by Dutch Sheets.
Dutch Sheets sees the Appeal to Heaven flag as a symbol of Christian revolution.
If you look closely at January 6th, you will see dozens of Appeal to Heaven flags.
It may have a long history, but in the contemporary context, it has a very specific meaning.
And he is right!
In order to do a deeper dive, I turn to experts who provide context and history for the Appeal to Heaven Flag and explain why this is such a bad sign.
The first person you're going to hear is Dr. Matthew Taylor, the creator of Charismatic Revival Fury and a world expert on the New Apostolic Reformation, the Appeal to Heaven Flag, and Dutch Sheets.
The next person you're going to hear is Annika Brockschmidt, a journalist based in Germany who's written extensively On the New Apostolic Reformation and Christian Nationalism in the United States, I also spoke to Andrew Seidel of Americans United.
Andrew's a constitutional lawyer.
He wrote The Founding Myth, a fantastic book that dispels the idea that the founders created the United States in order to be a, quote, Christian nation.
He also wrote a book called American Crusade about the Supreme Court and the ways that it has been captured by Christian nationalist extremists.
Finally, I spoke to the Reverend Angela Denker.
Angela wrote a book called Red State Christians that is just a fantastic deep dive into the wreckage that white Christian nationalism leaves behind in religious communities and their broader publics in the United States.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is a special episode of Straight White: American Jesus.
Here's Matthew Taylor talking about Dutch Sheets, the Appeal to Heaven flag, and Samuel Alito.
I was actually contacted by Jodi Kantor earlier this week, and she did not inform me which Supreme Court justice she was looking into, but it was clear from her questions that that was the story, that it was a Supreme Court justice.
And I gave her some background information on Dutch Sheets and on the NAR and a number of links and sources, nothing that would
I don't want to surprise anyone who listened to Charismatic Revival Fury, but that did prompt me to go and look at Dutch Sheets' record on the Supreme Court and what he says about the Supreme Court and how he thinks about the Supreme Court, because in Charismatic Revival Fury and in my forthcoming book, I'm much more focused on Sheets in relationship with especially the executive branch of the government.
And what I discovered just going back through some of Sheet's records and the places where he's referring to the Supreme Court is that in some ways this is his other obsession.
Maybe his underlying obsession is thinking about how the Supreme Court could change To the United States, and how to access and have connections to that power.
In one of the videos I saw, I believe it was from 2018, he was speaking at a church and he gave this very interesting analogy where he said, apparently this is a common image that gets used in a lot of leadership briefings and manuals and things.
But it's the image of the Chinese bamboo plant, and I really am not sure if this is Like you're at Herbology or just a little mythical parable.
But as the story goes, you plant the seed of a Chinese bamboo plant and then you water it and you fertilize it year after year after year for five years without seeing any growth whatsoever.
And then suddenly, after five years, the thing shoots up and in six weeks grows 90 feet.
And the moral of this little parable is that it takes those five years for the seed to grow the root structure to support this almost miraculous growth that happens in year five.
And in this video, Sheets tells that, gives that kind of image, that metaphor, and then he applies it to the Supreme Court.
And in the same video, he tells the story of a time in 2005 where he was given a prophetic word from another NAR prophet, he doesn't name who, and he is told that he needs to go to the Supreme Court, to the building of the Supreme Court, and issue five decrees at the Supreme Court.
And so, Sheets is a real believer in prophecy, and so he takes this prophecy seriously, and he goes, he makes a special trip.
To Washington, D.C., and on his own, and speaks these five decrees to each of the four sides of the Supreme Court building, and then leaves.
And two weeks after he does this, again, according to the story, Sandra Day O'Connor announces that she is retiring as a Supreme Court justice.
And before the Bush administration can fill that seat, William Rehnquist dies.
And the sheet doesn't connect all the dots.
That's the backstory of how we got John Roberts and Sam Alito.
It was these two openings that came up in late 2005 and early 2006.
And so, but when you think about the metaphor and the way that Sheetz is using these stories, and he expands on this and he says that This is the process that we have for changing the court.
And it's not that the miracle is this thing that comes out of nowhere.
We have to plant, we have to cultivate the soil, we have to plant the seed, we have to manage the plant.
And then he talks about we need to change the atmosphere and we need to change the nation.
What I realized after watching this through a couple times, it's actually a very sophisticated understanding of how the religious right has targeted the United States Supreme Court really over the last 40, 50 years.
Of trying to change U.S.
policy, U.S.
law, U.S.
culture through the Supreme Court.
And they have invested all this time and all this energy.
They've cultivated lawyers and law students and judges and politicians who would nominate the right judges and organizations for managing these judges.
And then suddenly this thing breaks out in the open and they get two new Supreme Court justices.
Three new Supreme Court justices in the case of the first Trump administration.
It's truly quite remarkable that you... I think many people who would look at Dutch Sheets might think that he's simply just a kook who believes that he has the power to declare things and prophesy them into being.
But he's also a very sophisticated strategist.
He understands the bigger picture.
He understands the game that is being played, and he plays it very, very well.
I am left with a lot of questions.
Having read the New York Times article, and obviously having been involved in the process by which it came together, when Brad Onishi and I wrote our piece back in November that exposed that Mike Johnson was flying the appeal to have him fly outside his office, Mike Johnson had the decency to tell Rolling Stone, to tell us through Rolling Stone, where he got the flag and what it meant to him.
And I think it's very interesting that Samuel Alito doesn't, he gave an explanation for the first flag, for the upside down American flag that stopped the steel symbol that he flew after January 6th.
He said he blamed it on his wife.
He gave an explanation for that flag.
Why isn't he explaining the Appeal to Heaven flag?
Is he just fed up with giving explanations?
Is this a more embarrassing backstory?
Does it reveal more about him?
I really don't know.
What does this flag mean to Sam Alito and his wife?
To my knowledge, they're both Catholic.
They don't really fit the profile.
If there is a profile of what it means to be charismatic, they seem very stoic and state and upper crust.
Why?
Why are they flying this flag?
What does it mean to them?
Is there some connection to the NAR?
Is it just that the symbol of the Appeal to Heaven flag has migrated, has reached escape velocity out of the orbit of the NAR and become this broader far-right symbol?
Was it about January 6th?
I mean, the appeal to Heaven Flag in the way that Sheets uses it and intends it, it really is a multifaceted symbol of restoring American identity, restoring this Christian identity that Sheets believes is covenantal in America.
It actually predates the founding, goes back to Jamestown and to the Puritans.
Is that what Alito's gesturing towards?
You know, the flag also, because it's emerging in 2013 is when Sheets first conceptualizes this, and he rolls it out with his book in 2015.
So it gets tied up with the Obergefell decision, and gay marriage, and abortion, and then with Donald Trump, and then with January 6th.
So it's an image, it's a meme that carries all of these far-right meanings.
Which of those does Sam Alito intend, or is it something else entirely?
It's very odd.
And when you think about a flag, a flag is not a personal decoration.
It's not a photo in your home.
A flag is the signal that you send to the rest of the world.
It's something you broadcast.
What is Sam Alito trying to broadcast to the world?
What is he signaling and who is he signaling it to that he would fly that flag at his vacation home for about two months?
When we think about January 6th, I have immersed myself in the data of January 6th.
The people who showed up on January 6th were very intentional about the symbols they chose.
They had to pack those things.
They had to get up that morning and say, this is the flag I'm going to carry.
This is the shirt I'm going to wear.
This is the Bible I'm going to carry.
These are the songs we're going to sing.
There was an intentionality to it.
I think we need to take that intentionality seriously.
And not just assume, oh, this is just somebody who's an idiot because they have a Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president flag.
They're just a dumb Christian nationalist.
They're choosing those things.
They want to tell you something.
What is Sam Milito trying to tell us with his appeal to heaven flag?
Who is he trying to tell it to?
Thank you for that insightful and yet haunting reflection, Matt.
Matthew Taylor's book, The Violin Ticket by Force, is available for pre-order.
You can check the show notes to get your hands on a copy.
You can also check out Charismatic Revival Fury, the award-winning series that Matt and I produced together.
I want to turn now to Annika Brockschmidt, who's a journalist based in Berlin, but who's been writing about Christian nationalism in the United States for a long time.
A friend of the show, she's somebody who always has a unique perspective on these events.
Hi, Brad.
Thanks for having me.
You know, some things are not surprising.
For example, it's not a surprise that Samuel Leto, judge on the highest court of the land, is a raging misogynist as well as a right-wing crank and seemingly, at least from what I can deduce from his behaviour during various oral arguments and from pretty much every single public appearance he's ever made, a pretty miserable git.
And I get it, you know, there might be some people who say, why do any of you make such a fuss about what kind of flag a judge flies?
Who cares?
And to that, I'll say, all of us, all of us should care because the Alito flag saga, as absurd as it may seem, is not just him flying the flag of his favourite sports team.
Let's just get into it.
Let's start with the first one.
The one he blamed on his wife, Martha Ann Alito.
Alito, or at least one of the Alitos, flew, after January 6th, an upside-down American flag.
This is a flag that is supposed to indicate distress, the overthrow of order, and it was used by the Stop the Steal people and those adjacent to it to signal that, in their view, the lawful order of the country had been overthrown because they believed the election had been stolen from Donald Trump.
This is a Supreme Court justice.
A Supreme Court justice signalling that he, or his household, believes that Joe Biden won the election illegitimately.
A member of the highest court of the land with a lifetime appointment.
And what did Alito do?
Blamed his wife.
Now, I don't know about you, Brad, but when I have, and I think he called it, a dispute with a neighbour, I usually don't fly a flag associated with a movement that's trying to overthrow the government.
You know, but maybe people are different.
Maybe that's her coping mechanism for neighbourly squabbles.
Was it Mrs. Alito who flew the flag?
I mean, let's be honest, we have no way of knowing.
But I'll say this, I'd be damned if a massive misogynist such as Samuel Alito lets his wife decide which flag he's flying in his house.
Come on.
That was the first flag.
And then, and I think I texted you yesterday as soon as I saw this stuff, as soon as I saw the photo and I'd verified it because I genuinely wasn't sure if it was real at first, news broke that the Appeal to Heaven flag had been flying at the Elitist's beach house long way after January 6th.
And not for a couple of days, mind you, but for months.
And you can look it up on Google Street View.
No joke, you can look it up on Google Street View.
And I know that you and Matt are going to talk in detail about the background of the flag, including its NAR connection, so I thought I'll use my time to tackle two other aspects that I find pretty striking.
The first one The first one is the New York Times description of this because I think it's symbolic for and an indictment of how a lot of large media houses and outlets have been handling both this election and the threat to democracy posed by the Republican Party.
I'll just read the quote and then I'll get into it.
Another provocative flag was flown at another Alito home, that just as his beach house displayed an appeal to heaven flag, a symbol carried on January 6th and associated with a push for a more Christian-minded government.
End quote.
A more Christian-minded government.
Where to even start?
Just to reiterate, the Appeal to Heaven flag is a flag that is calling for going to war and basically letting God decide.
I think that's how Matt has put it in the past.
A flag that is calling for violent revolution, for an overthrow of government, and to install a theocracy.
You know I don't know about you but I'd say provocative doesn't exactly describe accurately what's happening here.
But this once again shows how large parts of national and let's be honest international news media organizations have been treating and still treat this as sort of normal horse race stuff with this false sense of
Objectivity that leads them to downplay Republican extremism in order to not appear to quote-unquote tip the scales in favor of the one of the two parties that still follows the rules of democracy and that they also either don't have the expertise to recognize this right-wing extremist stuff when they encounter it or that they don't care.
I don't know which one it is and I honestly don't know which would be worse.
And the second point that I want to make And what, even though I'm hard to shock at this point, has at least truly baffled me is the blatant open mocking disregard for democracy that this shows.
Again, and I know you've talked about this many times, Mike Johnson also flies the Appeal to Heaven flag in front of his congressional office.
That's really, really bad.
Don't get me wrong.
Mike Johnson is the third in line to the presidency.
It's bad.
But we're talking about a Supreme Court justice here who was flying this flag seemingly for months in 2023.
The pictures that are circulating are from July, August and September 2023, when this flag is up at his New Jersey beach house.
At the same time that a case regarding the insurrection this flag is supporting landed in front of the Supreme Court.
And of course he has not recused himself from this case.
Why would he?
Clarence Thomas' wife is an insurrectionist and he hasn't recused himself.
Why would Zambolito?
But let me wrap it up.
What does this tell us?
I'd say two things.
One, taken together with the news about Alito, you know, dropping his shares in Bud Light alongside with every other transphobic right-winger in the country, it tells us that Samuel Alito is deep, deep down the extremist right-wing rabbit hole.
To fly that flag and to be outraged about Bud Light, you both need to be in deep with the most extremist faction of white Christian nationalists and spend your days watching Fox News and the like.
And again, we knew Sam Alito hates women, he hates abortion, he's a right-wing nutjob.
Again, not news.
But the open mockery And the total disregard of any sense of pretense, that there isn't even an attempt to, you know, conceal this really unhinged stuff, is really telling.
Because it tells us that one, he's a true believer, and it's even worse than we might have thought, and two, he knows nothing will happen to him.
That Sam Alito has the confidence that nothing will happen to him is what I really deduce from this episode.
He knows that he can show his true colours openly, mockingly even, and that he will be safe.
Because let's be honest, the ethics code, so-called ethics code the court gave itself, Isn't worth the paper it was written on because it was always a PR stunt.
The only ones to enforce the ethics code is the court.
This ethics code is supposed to reign.
It's it was always clear.
It was it was bullshit, basically.
Sorry, I'm not quite sure if I'm allowed to swear.
So if I'm not allowed to swear, you can cut that bit out.
But Sam Alito also seems very, very confident that Democrats won't even try to impeach him, won't even, even if they don't have the votes, won't even try to embarrass him publicly, to damage the Republican cause by dragging this out, by showing Sam Alito as the extremist that he is for everybody in the whole country to see.
And honestly, he's probably right about that.
Dick Durbin already said during the first Flaggate, no, we're not going to do that.
No impeachment.
So why would he start an impeachment now?
I find it mind-boggling that the Democratic leader of the Senate Judiciary Committee apparently needs a strong reminder of what his job description actually entails, but Alito seems bang on in his assessment of his perpetual job security, no matter what insurrection flag he flies.
And at this point, the easier question seems to be, which insurrectionist flag has Sam Alito not flown yet?
And I'm kind of already partly kidding, because he's already got the big two, so it would be hard to top these two in their open and blatant contempt for democracy.
But Brad, if there's one thing that Sam Alito keeps proving to all of us, there is no level that is too low, too deep for him to sink to.
So who knows, you know?
I guess the only way he, a sitting Supreme Court Justice, I know all of you know this, I know I keep repeating it, I just have to repeat it because it's so incredibly insane, could top these flags supporting an insurrection.
And the only way that could happen is maybe if he hoisted the, you know, the black American flag, the no court is given, no mercy flag that announces that every perceived quote unquote enemy, everybody not on the right side will be shot on the spot.
It's what Jeff Charlotte calls the genocide flag.
And the fact that I wouldn't completely rule it out that Alito Owens won pretty much sums up how bad this has gotten.
As always, Annika, I appreciate your candor.
I appreciate your passion.
And I appreciate the way you connect the dots when these kinds of stories break.
Up next is Andrew Seidel, who's a constitutional lawyer at Americans United and somebody with a long history commenting on the court, researching the court, and just trying to let others know exactly how this court has been captured.
Andrew?
Flying the appeal to heaven flag is sort of like a secret handshake for Christian nationalists.
It's a way for one Christian nationalist to recognize another, for a public official who is a Christian nationalist to publicly declare their affiliation, their faith in the Christian nationalist movement, but doing so in a way that gives them plausible deniability.
Oh no, this is just a historical flag that invokes John Locke, related to George Washington.
It gives them that cover, but allows people in the know to say, ah yes, they are with me.
They are part of my movement.
That's one of the reasons that we saw this flag everywhere on January 6th.
This features pretty widely in the January 6th insurrection report that we wrote on Christian nationalism that I spearheaded with Amanda Tyler of Christians Against Christian Nationalism, in which Katherine Stewart and Jamar Tisby and Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry, a bunch of folks contributed too.
And we cover the fact that this this appeal to heaven flag was all over the insurrection not just at the insurrection itself But also in the lead-up to the insurrection during the dry runs in the in the let the church roar March also known as the Jericho March like named after a biblical genocide
This flag is an integral part of their movement, and Bradley and of course you and Matthew Taylor have done this great job of tracing it and the affiliation with the NAR, but it is a way for Christian nationalists to signal to each other that they're part of this movement.
Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania uses it in a way that Dutch Sheets does, right?
As a backdrop on his videos and flew it outside of his office.
Of course Mike Johnson does.
Glenn Grothman in Wisconsin does.
We know that this happened in Arizona.
State politics as well at the state capitol there.
Somebody even told me on social media, I have not had a chance to go verify this, they sent me a picture saying that Lauren Boebert had it outside her office as well.
The fact that we now have credible evidence of a Supreme Court justice flying this flag, giving this wink and nod to the Christian nationalist movement in America, is terrifying.
It is a huge deal.
I mean, first of all, there's the obvious partisan affiliation problems.
All of those politicians that I mentioned are Republicans.
There's a very clear party divide here.
There's an affiliation of a partisan nature that is problematic for judges.
Judges are supposed to remain impartial in when they are deciding election cases about, for instance, majority-minority districts and the Voting Rights Act, and cases involving January 6th insurrectionists who flew this same flag, and whether or not Donald Trump is immune from prosecution under our Constitution.
Who's biggest defender, by the way, appears to be Sam Alito.
At least if oral argument is anything to go on.
So there's a very big partisan issue here too, but there's also the larger issue which is tied in with that of affiliating openly with Christian nationalism.
Because as Rachel Lazar has often said, who's the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, she likes to say, quote, the end point of Christian nationalism is nothing less than the toppling of our democracy.
And she is absolutely right.
Christian nationalism is inherently anti-democratic.
And if we have one of the nine most powerful people in this country right now, one of the members of our Supreme Court, aligned with this anti-democratic movement, it's a huge problem.
It's a huge problem.
People will remember some of the hearings, contentious judicial hearings that we've had.
One of the things that has come up, this came up when Amy Coney Barrett was nominated for the Seventh Circuit, and rather, I'll use the phrase elegant for how Dianne Feinstein questioned Amy Coney Barrett about this, about whether or not her religious beliefs will trump her oath to uphold the Constitution.
And that is a perfectly fair question to ask any judge.
In fact, judges swear to uphold the Constitution.
They have to.
That is a prerequisite to holding that office.
They have to honor their oath of office and uphold that above all else, including their personal religion.
And if their personal religion and the Constitution conflict, they have to go with the Constitution.
When they put on that robe, the Constitution comes first.
That's not to say they don't have religious freedom, of course they do, but they don't get to abuse the power of their office to impose their personal religion on everybody else.
And there's a good indication that Sam Alito has been doing that in his opinions in the Bladensburg Cross case where he upheld this 40-foot massive Christian cross on government land and forced taxpayers to fund its upkeep and repair.
Think back to the Hobby Lobby case in 2014 when he robbed employees of rights they had to specific health care in the name of the religion of the owners of or the beneficiaries of a trust that owned another trust that owned the Hobby Lobby Corporation, the Green family.
If you listen to what Sam Alito says elsewhere, he doesn't think they are.
We know what he's talking about.
For instance, if you go look at his talk to the Avocati Christi, which is this group of Catholic lawyers, he makes this clear.
And I do cover some of this in American Crusade.
We have a very serious problem here with a Supreme Court justice who appears to be subverting the Constitution in favor of his religion.
Through his opinions and now openly flying a Christian nationalist flag.
Or at least this flag was flown at his house and he declined to respond to the news reports.
And I just do think it's worth pointing out that It's not an, this is not something that can be as easily shrugged off as the stop the steal flag.
That he flew for a couple reasons.
I mean, first of all, every, not everybody, I have an American flag.
Many people have an American flag.
It's easy to have an American flag and fly it upside down.
You don't have to take any other steps other than putting your flag up for the day.
Anybody could do that.
Then throw their wife under the bus and blame her for for doing it upside down.
But the appeal to heaven flag, he had to go out of his way.
Whoever had to go out of their way to get that flag to put it on the flagpole at Sam Alito's beach house.
That it's not something that you stumble across.
It's something that you actively seek out after seeing it elsewhere.
Maybe at the January 6th insurrection.
Maybe outside of Mike Johnson's office.
Maybe on a Dutch Sheets video or on the cover of Dutch Sheets' book.
I think this is an absolutely huge deal.
I think it calls for congressional hearings.
I think the Senate judiciary needs to investigate what is happening at the Supreme Court, especially with Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, everything from the absurd and lavish vacations and super yachts and trips on jets and RVs everything from the absurd and lavish vacations and super yachts and trips on jets and RVs being purchased for justices
And why in the wake of that, this justice, this supposedly impartial judge is not recusing himself at the very least.
So to me, this is just absolutely a huge deal.
And this is like the, this is the warning bell that I was trying to ring when I wrote American Crusade, how the Supreme Court is weaponizing religious freedom.
And I.
I think Alito has been on the court since he's been on the court since 2005 for almost 20 years.
I think he is more emboldened than most, but I think he has five folks on that court who are just as sympathetic, but maybe willing to be a little bit more cautious and quiet about their sympathies.
We have a real problem.
So far, we've had a scholar of religion, a journalist, and a constitutional lawyer all express just how grave it is to see a Supreme Court justice flying an appeal to heaven flag.
Let's finish today by bringing in a reverend, Angela Denker, who is a veteran journalist, but also active clergy based in Minneapolis.
As I mentioned, she's written a great book called Red State Christians, somebody who tackles the phenomenon of Christian nationalism from a bifocal perspective as a writer and as a minister.
Angela, off to you.
So as a Lutheran pastor and a writer and a researcher on Christian nationalism, when I try to help people understand why Christian nationalism is not harmless, not just a belief that America should hold up Christian values, but instead is a dangerous authoritarian movement that is designed to take away rights from marginalized people in this country, one of the ways that I try to help people understand this is by explaining that
While the message of Jesus lifts up the inherent human dignity of every single person, what the proponents of Christian nationalism want to lift up is this sense that some people are more valuable than others.
And that some people have to follow the rules and for some people there are no rules.
That instead the rules are really written to keep certain types of people in power.
Naturally rich, wealthy, educated, powerful white men.
Men like Supreme Court Justice Alito.
So one of the reasons that I bring this up is because The fact that Justice Alito has been flying flags at his house that are flags that have been used not only in the insurrection, but flags that have been flown by neo-Nazis, flags that really seek to undermine the movement in America toward tolerance, towards diversity.
Flags that started flying in many places in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, after the murder of George Floyd, which happened just a few miles from my home here in Minneapolis.
These flags sought to counter the message of Black Lives Matter, which was returning to that message I spoke about earlier, that each human life has inherent dignity, and so we must fight against messages that say some lives are more valuable than others.
Now Justice Alito seems to be pretty secure in his sense that his life is indeed more valuable than others and also that that the rules that apply to others that apply to those he He bears judgment on in his courtroom.
Those rules don't apply to him.
Earlier this week, I was addressing a group of new pastors, new Lutheran pastors here in Minnesota, and we were talking about Christian nationalism.
And one of the pastors asked me as they're preparing to pastor through a presidential election season, they asked me, You know, there's a lot of yard signs in my neighborhood and, you know, there's a lot of political yard signs.
And they said, would you, as a pastor, display a yard sign, a political yard sign?
And I said, no, you know, I I'm not nearly as much of a public person and I don't have a tiny little kernel of the power or influence that Justice Alito has.
But nonetheless, I hold myself to much more stringent ethical standards than Justice Alito does.
I don't think it's appropriate for journalists or for pastors to take explicitly partisan stands because we need to have a place of power and trust in the public in order for our profession to matter, in order for me to be able to write as a journalist and for people to believe me.
They have to trust me and they have to trust that I am trying to share the truth and not trying to operate according to a specific partisan agenda.
The same is true for for parish pastors.
So it's really disappointing, but also not so surprising to see that Justice Alito does not follow any sort of code of ethics.
And in fact, he doesn't think that it matters if the American people trust him, if the American people think that he's fair.
Because all that he has to do is continue to have the trust and the confidence of the wealthy lobbyists, the wealthy white men, the wealthy Christian nationalists who have put him in power, such as famed Supreme Court Justice Fixer Leonard Leo, who famously this past week, his home was also shown that it flies the very same flag that Justice Alito flew at his vacation home.
That'll do it for us today on this special episode of Straight White American Jesus.
I'll have more to say about this tomorrow on the Weekly Roundup.
As always, you can subscribe to Straight White American Jesus as a premium member, get ad-free listening, access to our 600-episode archive, join us in the Discord server, bonus content on Mondays, and an extra episode every month with Dan and I. Hope you all are well, coping as this news breaks, and bracing for more.
