Two things can be true at once. One, a Supreme Court justice should not have the American flag displayed in any way but according to the regulations at his private residence.

Mrs. Alito is genuinely interested in, perhaps obsessed by, flags and their meaning, and her “distress signal” of hoisting an upside-down American flag is totally understandable. Though it was foreseeable that this gesture could be misinterpreted by the very people she hoped to shoo away.

I have nothing but sympathy for the spouses of public figures. They often feel the insults hurled at their mates more acutely. They seek to provide shelter for someone who is necessarily under fire when in public. And in Alito’s case, years after this incident, someone who worked with her husband leaked the Dobbs decision that he wrote, with the obvious consequence that it would send mentally unbalanced assassins out against the members of the conservative majority and their families. Sure enough, one showed up.

The leak malefactor was never exposed, presumably because a liberal lawyer’s reputation is more important than the norms that protect the Court from violence.