Alito Flew ‘Stop the Steal’ Flag in Front of House

[stevil]

I’m trying to imagine how embarrassing it must be to have gone to an ivy league law school, and risen to one of the most prestigious legal positions in the world, only to have your wife pushing crackpot conspiracy theories in public. I’d be mortified and I’m a nobody.

On the one hand it is just flying a flag. It's not storming the Capitol and attacking police and trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

But on the other hand it is not a good look for a member of the Supreme Court to fly a flag in solidarity with those that attacked the capital and tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Elections matter, USA should not have a group of people trying to use force and violence to gain the white house.

Alito really should have taken that flag down, his reputation as a sitting Supreme Court Justice is much more important than his wife's huwt feewings that her neighbor is expressing their first amendment rights by showing they don't like Trump.

 

[iluvatar5150]

On the one hand it is just flying a flag. It's not storming the Capitol and attacking police and trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

But on the other hand it is not a good look for a member of the Supreme Court to fly a flag in solidarity with those that attacked the capital and tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Elections matter, USA should not have a group of people trying to use force and violence to gain the white house.

Alito really should have taken that flag down, his reputation as a sitting Supreme Court Justice is much more important than his wife's huwt feewings that her neighbor is expressing their first amendment rights by showing they don't like Trump.

I should add that I'd also be mortified if my wife got into a cringey public spat with a neighbor over virtually anything.

 

[Zaha Torte]

I know I have zero first-hand knowledge of them. That's why I don't go around arguing about what I saw with my own two eyes.

Regarding the courts, no court has first-hand knowledge of anything. The whole process is designed for the court to be a neutral space for both side (some of whom do have first-hand knowledge) to present their evidence to neutral parties. That Team Trump could not win any of their cases suggests to me that their evidence is lacking.

Who cares if no one in the Court had first-hand knowledge?

You immediately disregarded what I said based on that.

 

[iluvatar5150]

Who cares if no one in the Court had first-hand knowledge?

You immediately disregarded what I said based on that.

No, what I disregarded was your comment about your "lying eyes." Your "lying eyes" only saw what Team Trump wanted you to see.

 

[Zaha Torte]

No, what I disregarded was your comment about your "lying eyes." Your "lying eyes" only saw what Team Trump wanted you to see.

The stuff I saw live on election night and the days following?

 

[RocksInMyHead]

The stuff I saw live on election night and the days following?

Again, unless you were at the polling places, you did not see anything. A talking head on the TV interpreting what's happening in a short video clip is not "seeing something". The vote counts shown are not accurate real-time representations of the count - numbers are reported in batches, and certain areas or batches of ballots (i.e. mail-in ballots) may favor one candidate over the other based on voting trends and demographics. And so on.

No court has first-hand knowledge of anything - that's why attorneys call witnesses and present physical or electronic evidence. As the accuser, it was up to Trump and his attorneys to demonstrate that something untoward happened in the election using witnesses and evidence, but they were unable to do so. The fact that that doesn't jive with what certain news networks were telling you (and the fact that those news networks have since admitted to lying about the election) should suggest that perhaps those news networks were lying to you and presenting events out of context in order to create a narrative - the standards of evidence are much higher in a court of law than in the newsroom.

 

[iluvatar5150]

The stuff I saw live on election night and the days following?

What exactly did you see live on election night?

 

[JSRG]

Alito is one of my least favorite of the Republican-appointed justices, but this claim of him showing support for "stop the steal" seems a major stretch to me.

However, in regards to the "stolen election" claims in general:

I saw enough on election day/night - and a whole lot afterwards - to leave me doubting the results of that election.

Too many shenanigans and they only occurred in background counties.

A major problem with the "stolen election" idea--among several other problems, in fact--is where Trump lost. This article (by someone who, while having a low opinion of Trump, also strongly dislikes Biden) explains in considerable detail why we can be pretty confident Biden actually won:

Biden Really Won

I'm not happy about it, but facts don't care about my feelings.

decivitate.substack.com

But here's the most important part, in regards to "where Trump lost", which I'll quote.

That brings me to the fourth way we know Biden won: the demographics.

The core of the stolen-election theory runs something like this: Trump got enough votes to win, but the Democrats hated Trump so much that their voters and officials manufactured Biden votes (and shredded Trump votes) in deep blue counties, especially big cities, in order to pull ahead of Trump late in the night. Trump won Wisconsin, until Milwaukee officials realized Biden was losing and started creating fraudulent votes for Milwaukee. That’s how Trump himself has always described the big-picture of the theory. It does have a certain obvious plausibility. It’s not far off from the stories we all heard growing up about Mayor Daly stealing elections in Chicago. And Democrats really did hate Trump enormously.

However, if the election was stolen, this definitely isn’t how it was done.

We know this because of the demographics.

Trump actually did better in the cities in 2020 than he did in 2016. His margin among black voters was the best of any Republican since Bob Dole in 1996. He trounced McCain and Romney among Hispanics, drawing the best GOP Hispanic numbers since Bush 2004. Overall, he gained 2.1% in big cities compared to his 2016 result. He even gained a point in Indian Country, which is some of the toughest territory for Republicans.

If Trump’s performance in cities improved compared to 2016, then that probably isn’t because of fraud. It would be really weird for Milwaukee County officials to fake an election result by giving more votes to Trump than he got the last time. Even if they did do fraud there, it would be the most incompetent fraud in history!

But, hang on, if Trump gained ground in the biggest Democratic strongholds on the map, how the heck did he lose?

Trump lost because Biden consistently eroded Trump’s margins in the suburbs, the exurbs, and even in the rural Midwest. These erosions weren’t huge, and they didn’t generally flip the local results. For example, in 2016, Trump won the exurbs by 15 points! In 2020, he still won the exurbs… but, this time, only by 12 points. Trump won by the skin of his teeth in 2016. Add up these losses, and they outweigh his gains in the cities, and he loses the election.

Take Waukesha County, the very comfortable county composed of people who don’t want to live in Milwaukee. This Republican stronghold has delivered so many elections to Republicans at the eleventh hour that it became a global punchline. Trump won Waukesha County, by a very comfortable 21 points! Waukesha is MAGA country!

But he won it by 28 in 2016.

This pattern replicates itself everywhere. Donald Trump didn’t lose the election in the cities. He lost the election out in the sticks, in deep-red Republican territory, because a small but decisive fraction of Republicans who supported him in 2016 (and Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008) decided at some point between 2016 and 2020 that they were fed up with Donald Trump. They voted for Biden.

“But hang on, James! We’re looking for fraud here! We can’t just assume these Waukesha County figures are accurate!”

Well, alright, fair enough, so let’s go with that. Our original theory was that local Democratic officials conspired with downtrodden urban voters to stuff a handful of dense urban ballot boxes, boosting Biden’s margin in the cities and giving him the extra votes he needed to win the election.

However, the crucial counties where Biden unexpectedly ate into Trump’s margins are Republican counties. So now our theory has to be that local Republican officials conspired with a bunch of well-to-do white people who are spread out across dozens of miles of sprawling exurban estates to stuff ballot boxes for Joe Biden, a candidate those same officials overwhelmingly… opposed? Why would they do this? Why, at the very least, would they cover up for it?

Maybe the Biden campaign paid them off? A cool $100,000 check deposited in a bank account will silence a lot of mouths.

If that’s so, though, why’d they do the same thing in Canadian County, Oklahoma? That’s another exurban county, very similar to Waukesha in a lot of ways… except that it’s in very nearly the reddest state in the Union. Trump won every county in Oklahoma, including the urban counties like Tulsa, and it was never remotely in play. Nevertheless, we see the same pattern: Trump won the county by 51 points in 2016, but by only 43 points in 2020. It’s ruby-red either way, and you wouldn’t look twice at it if you were just eyeballing an election map, but that erosion happened across the country.

This leaves us with two possible theories:

1. The Biden campaign faked this consistent suburban/exurban erosion in Trump support by suborning tens of thousands of county elections officials, ballot counters, and poll workers, the vast majority of them Republicans who publicly profess love for Trump, not just in the crucial states, but in a vast conspiracy that carpeted the land from sea to shining sea, and yet somehow didn’t leak at all, not even once, even as the White House scoured the country, searching for the slightest scrap of evidence of voter fraud. These faked suburban/exurban votes delivered Biden to the White House. OR:
2. During his time in office, President Trump alienated a small fraction of his former supporters, so they voted against him (or stayed home)—which, in a close election, was enough to make Biden the winner this time.

To me, the second theory is much more plausible on its face. It also fits with all the other evidence we have looked at.

I know that a sufficiently inventive theorist can always imagine a way to fit the evidence into the theory (rather than discarding a theory when it is defeated by the evidence), but, honestly, I would be interested in hearing the narrative where this theory makes anything like sense.

If we reject the theory that the Biden campaign blanketed Oklahoma and Wyoming with voter fraud in order to mask its implausibly difficult frauds in exurban Wisconsin, then we know that Biden won.

 

[Zaha Torte]

Again, unless you were at the polling places, you did not see anything. A talking head on the TV interpreting what's happening in a short video clip is not "seeing something". The vote counts shown are not accurate real-time representations of the count - numbers are reported in batches, and certain areas or batches of ballots (i.e. mail-in ballots) may favor one candidate over the other based on voting trends and demographics. And so on.

No court has first-hand knowledge of anything - that's why attorneys call witnesses and present physical or electronic evidence. As the accuser, it was up to Trump and his attorneys to demonstrate that something untoward happened in the election using witnesses and evidence, but they were unable to do so. The fact that that doesn't jive with what certain news networks were telling you (and the fact that those news networks have since admitted to lying about the election) should suggest that perhaps those news networks were lying to you and presenting events out of context in order to create a narrative - the standards of evidence are much higher in a court of law than in the newsroom.

In which evidentiary hearing was it proven that no election fraud took place?

 

[Zaha Torte]

What exactly did you see live on election night?

Video of many unchecked suitcases and coolers going into the ballot counting area in Michigan, Republican ballot watchers being forced out of counting area in Pennsylvania, ballot counters leaving because of a "broken water main" in Georgia only for a couple to return and resume counting without watchers present (the night ended with Trump in the lead and the moment they supposedly resumed in the morning Biden was way ahead), ballot counters waiting for ballot watchers to leave before pulling boxes of hidden ballots from underneath tables and resume counting (I don't remember exactly where that was), ballot counters covering the windows with carboard to prevent people from watching them count (again I don't remember where that was).

 

[RocksInMyHead]

In which evidentiary hearing was it proven that no election fraud took place?

Last I checked, the burden of proof was on the party claiming that something untoward has happened. That's how our legal system operates - innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. These weren't criminal trials, so there's no guilt or innocence to find, but the principle remains the same. If you allege election fraud, it's up to you to show that it happened, not for the other party to show that it did not occur. After all, you can't prove a negative.

So you'll need to tell me in which evidentiary hearing it was proven that substantive election fraud took place (there are a few cases of minor fraud from the 2020 election - most of which were perpetrated by Republicans, ironically - but nothing systemic, or that would have affected the outcome of any races).

 

[Pommer]

Video of many unchecked suitcases and coolers going into the ballot counting area in Michigan, Republican ballot watchers being forced out of counting area in Pennsylvania, ballot counters leaving because of a "broken water main" in Georgia only for a couple to return and resume counting without watchers present (the night ended with Trump in the lead and the moment they supposedly resumed in the morning Biden was way ahead), ballot counters waiting for ballot watchers to leave before pulling boxes of hidden ballots from underneath tables and resume counting (I don't remember exactly where that was), ballot counters covering the windows with carboard to prevent people from watching them count (again I don't remember where that was).

What impresses me about these sorts of claims are how utterly competent and crafty these elections-cheats are and yet, somehow forgetting that there are cameras simply EVERYWHERE now.

 

[Zaha Torte]

Last I checked, the burden of proof was on the party claiming that something untoward has happened. That's how our legal system operates - innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. These weren't criminal trials, so there's no guilt or innocence to find, but the principle remains the same. If you allege election fraud, it's up to you to show that it happened, not for the other party to show that it did not occur. After all, you can't prove a negative.

So you'll need to tell me in which evidentiary hearing it was proven that substantive election fraud took place (there are a few cases of minor fraud from the 2020 election - most of which were perpetrated by Republicans, ironically - but nothing systemic, or that would have affected the outcome of any races).

That was my claim - there were no evidentiary hearings.

 

[RocksInMyHead]

That was my claim - there were no evidentiary hearings.

Of the 62 cases brought by Trump and his supporters, 10 were decided on the merits (rather than being dismissed outright due to lack of standing or dropped by the plaintiffs). Of those, Ward v. Jackson, Law v. Whitmer, Bowyer v. Ducey, Constantino v. City of Detroit, and Arizona Republican Party v. Fontes were all dismissed, at least in part, due to the plaintiffs' inability to provide evidence for their claims. Bowyer v. Ducey had the most evidence presented, as I recall, and it was almost entirely made up of speculation, hearsay, and misleading presentation of events.

Here's a good summary: Results of Lawsuits Regarding the 2020 Elections

ETA: here's the court's ruling in Bowyer v. Ducey: https://electioncases.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Bowyer-v-Ducey-Doc84.pdf

See Section F (Failure to State a Claim) on page 22 for the court's discussion of the plaintiffs' evidence.

 

[Hank77]

ballot counters covering the windows with carboard to prevent people from watching them count (again I don't remember where that was).

Fact check: Videos showing crowd locked out of Detroit TCF Center with windows obstructed are missing context

Videos of a crowd locked out of a Detroit ballot counting center are missing context. Entry was limited for challengers from both parties.

www.usatoday.com

 

[Hank77]

ballot counters waiting for ballot watchers to leave before pulling boxes of hidden ballots from underneath tables and resume counting (I don't remember exactly where that was)

Gabriel Sterling walks 60 Minutes though surveillance footage from Fulton County taken the night of the 2020 Presidential Election.
Sterling is a Republican election official in GA where this took place.

 

[Hank77]

Video of many unchecked suitcases and coolers going into the ballot counting area in Michigan, Republican ballot watchers being forced out of counting area in Pennsylvania, ballot counters leaving because of a "broken water main" in Georgia only for a couple to return and resume counting without watchers present (the night ended with Trump in the lead and the moment they supposedly resumed in the morning Biden was way ahead),

I could find the sources for these two as well but I'll leave some of the leg work to you.

As far as Trump being ahead at night and Biden in the morning, I believe that was in PA. PA doesn't count their mail-in ballots until all other ballots are counted and seeing that there were many more mail-in ballots that year because of COVID-19 and mostly Democrats voted by mail-in ballots (Trump told Republicans not to) Biden was ahead in the morning.

That wouldn't happen in CO because this state adds mail-in ballots as they arrive not as a big batch at the end.

 

[Pommer]

I could find the sources for these two as well but I'll leave some of the leg work to you.

As far as Trump being ahead at night and Biden in the morning, I believe that was in PA. PA doesn't count their mail-in ballots until all other ballots are counted and seeing that there were many more mail-in ballots that year because of COVID-19 and mostly Democrats voted by mail-in ballots (Trump told Republicans not to) Biden was ahead in the morning.

That wouldn't happen in CO because this state adds mail-in ballots as they arrive not as a big batch at the end.

But if was an “honest election” why did Trump say that it wasn’t?
Has never crossed some minds.

 

[wing2000]

“His statement — which says his wife displayed a symbol associated with a failed coup to subvert democracy because she was offended by an anti-Trump sign one of her neighbors displayed — is so incoherent it is insulting to our collective intelligence. And a Justice who resides in a house that displays symbols glorifying a coup should not participate in cases that will determine whether people who participated in said coup will face any accountability.”
- Univ. of Michigan Constitutional Law Professor Leah Litman

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/20/alito-flag-ethics-supreme-court/

 

[JSRG]

“His statement — which says his wife displayed a symbol associated with a failed coup to subvert democracy because she was offended by an anti-Trump sign one of her neighbors displayed — is so incoherent it is insulting to our collective intelligence. And a Justice who resides in a house that displays symbols glorifying a coup should not participate in cases that will determine whether people who participated in said coup will face any accountability.”
- Univ. of Michigan Constitutional Law Professor Leah Litman

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/20/alito-flag-ethics-supreme-court/

Leah Litman saying something Alito did is wrong is sort of like Rudy Giuliani or Jon Eastman saying something Joe Biden did was wrong; they've got enough dislike of the person to begin with that their testimony is rather suspect (it's not quite as bad as Giulani/Eastman, to be fair, but only by a matter of degrees). I notice also it's claimed it's "incoherent" but no explanation is given as to how.

What seems more incoherent is the article itself. Here's the whole thing:

Among the Supreme Court’s abominations — shredding precedent to obliterate reproductive freedom, financial impropriety, partisanship — none compares to the upside-down flag, identified with violent insurrectionists, that flew over the home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Ethics experts and lawyers (including former judges) of all stripes expressed their outrage. “His statement — which says his wife displayed a symbol associated with a failed coup to subvert democracy because she was offended by an anti-Trump sign one of her neighbors displayed — is so incoherent it is insulting to our collective intelligence,” constitutional law professor Leah Litman emails me. “And a Justice who resides in a house that displays symbols glorifying a coup should not participate in cases that will determine whether people who participated in said coup will face any accountability.”

With a first paragraph like that, one may suspect that, much like Litman, perhaps the writer is not coming into this from a particularly neutral viewpoint.