As riots raged in Los Angeles on Sunday, The New York Times rushed to reassure readers that Mexican flags being waved by protesters were symbols not of insurrection or lawlessness, but of “pride in their heritage.” The Times’ sympathetic view of anti-law-and-order rioters is hardly notable, but comparing its glowing review of the symbolism and meaning of the Mexican flag’s use in the L.A. upheaval to its screeching hysteria over the Alito flags a year ago is a sharp reminder of just how biased the paper is.
Unlike many of the rioters in Los Angeles, Samuel and Martha-Ann Alito didn’t foment social unrest, throw rocks at police cars, hurl incendiaries, burn cars, or generally embroil themselves in more or less serious dust-ups with law enforcement. (Maybe they would have drawn a more favorable review from the Times if they had.) But the Times used Martha-Ann’s flying of an upside-down American flag (an age-old distress signal) in Jan. 2021 and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag (a banner with roots in the Revolutionary War) in mid-2023 as the launching pad for manufactured controversy aimed at destroying Justice Alito’s credibility — and the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
Times reporters presented the most extreme and egregious aspects of the Jan. 6 protests as the only context in which the Alito flags could be understood. The flags represented (and endorsed) all the most objectionable elements of the MAGA movement — 2020 election denialism, violent insurrection and overturn of constitutional norms, white Christian nationalism, and voracious and mindless loyalty to Trump — all clearly and unequivocally embodied in the banners, at least according to the Times.
Jodi Kantor, Aric Toler, and Julie Tate collaborated on the two articles that formed the foundation of the flag controversy hysteria, and a spate of pieces from the Times and other corporate media outlets quickly followed. The flags “telegraph[ed]” Justice Alito’s views; they were “provocative” and “a clear violation of ethics rules.” The “display at Alito’s home renew[ed] questions of Supreme Court’s impartiality,” and it was shocking, ostensibly, that “Alito refuse[d] calls for recusal over display of provocative flags.” Even the “experts question[ed] Alito’s failure” to do so.
The flag hoax was a “revelation,” a “saga,” a “controversy” that merited an entire podcast episode; opinion pieces, letters to the editor, and Daily Show reactions were all worthy of the Grey Lady’s coverage. It inspired probing legal analysis, and partisans from the “world’s greatest deliberative body” “sounded alarms.” The fact that the flags had flown in other times and places was hardly deemed relevant, and Times reporter Heather Knight was simply flabbergasted that left-wing San Francisco had also been flying the “Appeal to Heaven” flag (also called the “Pine Tree” flag) near city hall — for more than half a century.
The whole trumped-up fiasco was so significant in the Times’ view that its staff featured the Alito flags in secret-recording-based smears of the justice and his wife (whom Times writer Abbie VanSickle chastised for not loving the “pride” flag).
In stark contrast, the Times ascribed all the best motives to protesters displaying Mexico’s national banner at riots in L.A. — or simply took their stated motives at face value, quickly brushing aside the possibility that “demonstrators waving the Mexican flag” could be “insurrectionists.” Instead, Orlando Mayorquín, Livia Albeck-Ripka, and Mimi Dwyer fronted their piece with a quote from a demonstrator who claimed to be “a very proud American” but said that she had “to show support also for our Mexican brothers and sisters.”
Throughout the piece, the authors assert that people flying “the flag of their homeland” at violent protests are simply communicating “pride in their roots,” “solidarity with immigrants,” and “love,” according to one protester. Immigrants, after all, “feel attacked,” one professor argued. Another professor asserted that the protesters “have no doubt in their own citizenship or their own belonging here, but they understand the racial undertones of the attacks on immigrants.” To the Times, the Mexican flag is a “potent” symbol, though what is particularly “potent” about it — and for what purpose — is left unexplained.
The Times also left unexplored questions of whether the widespread flying of the Mexican flag represents allegiance or affinity for the Mexican government and the nefarious cartels that have infiltrated it. There was no deep analysis of the history of national flags as battle standards or of Mexico’s role in the riots. The authors did not discuss Claudia Sheinbaum’s “sid[ing] with the rioters waving Mexican flags over and against federal authorities attempting to enforce U.S. immigration law on American soil,” as The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson outlined, or whether the rioters were acting as Sheinbaum’s agents.
In sum the Times — whose investigative inquisitiveness was insatiable when it came to the supposed national implications of Martha-Ann Alito’s flags — became suddenly incurious when it came to the pervasive flying of a foreign flag in the United States of America amid anti-law riots that threaten to spread across the country and gift this nation another multibillion-dollar “summer of love.”
Of course, The New York Times’ constant double standard is unsurprising, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculously egregious. To the media, a flag is just a flag, after all — unless it can be used to destroy a conservative.