Last week, Jodi Kantor of the New York Times made a late bid to attack Justice Samuel Alito’s participation in two January 6-related cases (including the presidential immunity case) by suggesting that Alito had flown an upside-down flag at his home in mid January 2021 as a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement while he was considering cases challenging the 2020 election. I previously discussed two glaring problems with the story. First, there’s no evidence of Alito being involved in the flying of the flag: He says it was his wife who put it up briefly as part of a dispute with abusive neighbors, nobody contradicts this, and accounts from the neighbors confirm that it was Mrs. Alito who was embroiled in that dispute. Second, the “while considering” part was just false: Alito had tried before the election to avoid post-election controversies; he had already rejected any effort by that point to have the Court stop or even slow down the certification of Joe Biden’s victory; Trump had abandoned his legal challenges by the time of the flag dispute; and in the remaining case that Kantor references, Alito went out of his way to note that it would not affect the outcome of the presidential election.

So, the connective tissue between the “Stop the Steal” symbol and Alito’s judicial role was missing in two separate directions. But was there a “Stop the Steal” symbol at all? I confess that this was the first time I had ever even heard of an upside-down flag being used as a symbol specific to the “Stop the Steal” movement. Jeff Blehar had the same reaction:

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. As law professor David Bernstein points out on Twitter, the concept didn’t gain currency until much later (if at all, honestly).

Here’s what Bernstein found:

I follow the news reasonably closely, and until the recent brouhaha I had no idea that this was supposed to be a MAGA election denial thing. So I did a google search with a date restriction for 12/1/2020 to 1/6/2021 “upside down” “american flag” trump -alito (the latter to avoid getting recent hits that show up in the search anyway). As you can see for yourself, there are precious few references to anyone flying an American flag upside down to protest the election.

Margot Cleveland came to the same conclusion:

While there may have been a few upside-down flags seen displayed during protests at the Capitol, calling it a symbol of “Stop the Steal” is a completely concocted narrative. Consider, for instance, that contemporaneous reporting by leftist outlets, such as CNN, professing to “decod[e] the extremists symbols and groups at the Capitol Hill insurrection” included no mention of protesters appropriating an upside-down flag as a universal symbol for “Stop the Steal” adherents.

Ann Coulter adds that the sources cited by Kantor don’t bear much weight, including social-media posts that don’t draw the connection or were made long after the fact:

The idea that it was a secret symbol of “Stop the Steal” has zero support, zero evidence, zero examples of any “Stop the Steal” believers using it. The Times loaded up its false claims with links, giving the impression that it had gobs of proof, but when you click on those links, they have nothing to do with the Times’s assertions. Apparently, the Times’s only “source” is a lefty PhD student at Univ. of Colorado Boulder — but I repeat myself — whose entire oeuvre is about right-wing hate movements…In the Times’ follow-up article this week, really nailing down that an upside down flag was absolutely, 100% a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” campaign immediately after the 2020 Election, the paper cites — AGAIN — as its sole source … Alex Newhouse, PhD student, Univ. of Colorado Boulder…The Times’s hysterical promotion of its own invented story that Justice Alito had a “Stop the Steal” flag flying outside his house seems to rest entirely on the shoulders of this one PhD student.

One wonders what it would take to embarrass critics of the Court.