Smearing Alito and Thomas as Racist Insurrectionists

Written by Tim Graham

It’s hard to believe, but our “news” media think U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito‘s wife hanging a flag upside-down outside their home for a few days is a much more serious matter than an attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. That story was quickly squashed.

Start with taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, which never managed to produce a single feature story on the foiled Kavanaugh assassination but has provided multiple stories in the Alito flag frenzy. They use fake-neutral headlines like “Flag displays at Justice Alito’s homes concern judicial watchdogs.” Make that “Democrat law professors.”

NPR SCOTUS reporter Nina Totenberg, who tried to strangle the Clarence Thomas nomination in the crib, couldn’t muster any concern for Kavanaugh’s safety, but found the time for Alito-flag coverage. The idea that this slavish pal of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was going to furrow her brow about the bias of judges was a laughable matter.

Everyone with political eyes can see that the media are toeing the Democrat line that a U.S. Supreme Court with a conservative majority must be discredited. Forget all their bleatings that Trump was undermining confidence in government. “Objective” reporters always undermine confidence in government when conservatives have a toehold.

The latest decision they hated was an Alito opinion in a 6-3 ruling that the South Carolina legislature could move a sizable number of black voters out of the competitive 1st Congressional District into the black-majority 6th District. The majority ruled that this was a political gerrymander, which is legal, and not a racial gerrymander, which is illegal.

But they ruled against the NAACP, so there was hell to pay. On “All In with Chris Hayes” on May 23, the host lamented the decision and brought in MSNBC’s regular extremist Elie Mystal to concoct a theory on Alito’s majority opinion.

“The throughline between the Alito flag story, the Clarence Thomas coup story, and their wives, and what we saw today from the Supreme Court in this gerrymandering decision,” Hayes said, “is that they don’t want black people’s votes to count equally.”

As for Thomas, forget that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has a white husband. You’re only a sellout if you’re conservative. “I mean, he ain’t married to Ginni Thomas for nothing, all right … like that’s what the man thinks.” He claimed Thomas does not think the 14th Amendment “can be used to protect the voting rights of black people.”

On the Left, black voting rights translate into the ability to elect Democrats. That’s not the right to vote at all. It’s the right to be represented by a Democrat. If you don’t agree with that principle, you’re in favor of “diluting” black votes.

In Mystal’s conspiracy brain, “when people like Alito and Thomas support the insurrection, what are they saying? They’re saying that Trump won — lost the election but won the white vote … won the white vote by a lot.” He claimed they think white votes are “the only votes that matter.”

This character assassination of Alito and Thomas as racist insurrectionists is considered weighty legal analysis on MSNBC. On the Left, anything that disturbs their domination of government is an “insurrection,” which is why they endlessly associate every conservative with the Jan. 6 riot as much as they can. They are the ones who can’t stand dissent and an actual democracy where conservatives disturb their dreams of complete dominance.

Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the Media Research Center began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.