A story in two tweets, from No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, a left-wing podcast with nearly 400,000 followers on Twitter/X. In May 2024, Cohen tweeted, “A photo was just unearthed showing Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s home flying an upside-down American flag in January 2021. The upside-down flag was a symbol used by ‘stop the steal’ MAGA activists who were trying to overturn the 2020 election.”

We covered extensively at the time this ridiculous effort to besmirch Justice Alito over a flag flown briefly by his wife in a petty dispute with neighbors. But to people like Cohen, this was just a convenient club with which to hit Alito; there was never any sort of standard or principle involved. It’s all Calvinball. If further proof were needed, consider this tweet from Cohen on Sunday: “This is incredibly powerful. Yosemite National Park staffers are hanging a distress flag to stand up against Trump and Elon coming after the National Park Service and public lands.”

Can the exact same symbol be damning proof of insurrectionist sympathies and —when used by supposedly nonpartisan federal civil servants (presumably on public lands, in their workplace) — “incredibly powerful”? Of course it can, if you think nothing matters except whether it’s your side doing it or not.