Justice Samuel Alito's "upside-down" flag is now revealed as a secret shill for George Washington's Pine Tree flag which secretly shills for the Great Pentecostal Conspiracy to take over America

Or so says The New York Times, since Matthew Taylor says it

If one is to believe the latest “breaking news” from the New York Times, conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has now been caught red-handed (maybe even in flagrante dilecto) as a secret supporter of the January 6 riot because somebody somehow somewhere took a picture of his Florida beach house in 2023 flying another “controversial” flag.

We’ll get to what’s “controversial” about the flag in a minute.

Justice Alito has already been severely spanked in recent days by the progressive media for allowing an upside-down flag to be flown at his residence.

According to the Times, which broke the initial flag story, the upside-down presentation of Old Glory appeared on January 17, 2021, eleven days after the storming of the Capitol by overwrought Trump supporters. 

The Times interviewed neighbors who had been concerned that the upside-down flag symbolized support for the events of January 6, even though the paper itself admitted a few days later that it originally was used to represent ships in distress and over time - the article does not say when exactly - came to be “brandished more often by protesters across the political spectrum [emphasis mine] to signal that they believed the nation itself was in grave peril.”

The Times, and more than a few political tiger sharks who went into a feeding frenzy over the story, assumed the not so simultaneous simultaneity of the J6 fiasco and the upside-down flag proved Alito was flaunting his applause for the “insurrectionists”. 

But, of course, one also needs to ask whether Alito, who is politically conservative, could just as reasonably have been conveying the sentiment that the nation was in “distress” because some group tried to overthrow it.

Doubtful, yet also a reasonable conclusion without further information to go by.

Alito himself responded to such allegations in the initial Times article as follows:

I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag…It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.

Sounds plausible, but as not only Democrats but a few key Republicans reminded the justice, it was a “bad decision” to allow such a thing in January 2021 and clearly left the wrong impression.

Just as that story started to die down, however, the Times broke what it appeared to convey to readers was now the real smoking gun with dire implications proving its initial suspicions were correct. 

Times reporters Jodi Kantor, Aric Toler, and Jule Tate breathlessly bruited the following:

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs. This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

Okay, some J6 protesters did carry the “Appeal to Heaven flag”, also known as the “Pine Tree flag”.  Far, far more of them, it turns out, also carried the American flag, which is not in theory at least “controversial”.

That great, “scholarly” online organon known as Wikipedia, routinely accused of left-wing bias as well as selective censorship of information that does not fit its preferred narratives, only notes in passing that the flag had anything all to do with January 6. 

Wikipedia stresses that the flag, in addition to serving as a banner for Washington’s navy during the Revolutionary War, was “the official the maritime ensign for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts”, another obvious right-wing entity. 

Incidentally, there is a slightly different “Appeal to Heaven” flag, shown in the above graphic, which is used by the make-marijuana-legal movement!

The tree became the flag’s prime symbol because it correlated with the white pines used in New England’s colonial ship building industry.  As Wikipedia points out, the phrase “Appeal to Heaven” came from the 17^th century British philosopher John Locke, who used such wording in his Second Treatise of Civil Government.

By the way, virtually all historians agree that the lion’s share of the ideas enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution derive from the thought of John Locke, who as a Puritan happened to believe that governments are ordained by God in some way.

Anyone espousing that notion nowadays, according to Alito’s critics, is ipso facto a “Christian nationalist”, an hypothesis with which the authors of the latest Times article appear to agree.

As such a dangerous “Christian nationalist,” Locke used the expression “appeal to heaven” in attacking the divine right of kings, a major point of contention in the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and defending something called “liberty”.  Locke declared:

And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven [Once again, emphasis mine].

What all this signifies, if you somehow have difficulty comprehending seventeenth century king’s English, is that a la Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence nations have the right to self-determination and that government abridgment of free speech and the right to worship is tyranny.

Very, very explosive stuff!

But, if you read the Times account of such a flag that brandishes such phraseology, it is easy to get the impression that Locke, whom every introductory college course in political theory forces you to read, is now offering material support to religious extremists that want to take away your right to freedom of religion, let alone your right to pursue happiness. 

Is that what flying the “Appeal to Heaven” flag really means?

At this juncture we have to ask how such a canard actually arose, especially since (according to The New Republic in a story last November) House speaker Mike Johnson also flew the same flag.  In fact, it says, “he has three flags hanging outside his office: the American flag, the Louisiana state flag, and a flag representing a movement that wants to turn the United States into a religious Christian nation.”

The third one mentioned is the same flag as George Washington flew. But how do we know, in fact, that it represents a “movement” that is scheming to have America commandeered by Christian ayatollahs?

You can thank a certain academian by the name of Matthew Taylor, who is listed as “Senior Scholar” and “Protestant Scholar” at the Institute for Jewish-Christian-Islamic Studies (ICJS), a non-profit religious think tank in Baltimore, Maryland.

As far as I can tell, Taylor for the most part is the prime, if not the single, source for most of the news articles claiming the “Appeal to Heaven” flag is a symbol of the supposedly well-orchestrated effort to transform the United States “into a religious Christian nation”.  He is also the “expert” cited in the Times latest hit piece on Alito.

In the piece the authors of the Times article parrot uncritically Taylor’s own well-worn conspiratorial hypothesis that the appearance anywhere any time of the pine tree flag nowadays indicates that the “Christian nationalists” - a meaningless descriptor with its own conspiratorial connotations – are about to rise up, suborn Trump’s election this fall, and change the U.S. Constitution into that of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The covert cabal behind this hypothesized “insurrection”, which according to Taylor is far more dangerous than even January 6, is a bunch of Texas-based Pentecostal preachers, especially a YouTube personality named Dutch Sheets who is part of something called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).

I have written in detail back in February how ludicrous Taylor’s conspiracy theory is when you actually analyze it from a genuine scholarly perspective. But it seems the Times is now lapping it up in a sedulous effort to torpedo Alito (hey, that rhymes).

Yes, Sheets adopted the “Appeal to Heaven” flag because, well, his shtick as a pastor and evangelist is to “appeal to heaven”.  Ya’ know, Christians – and Jews and Muslims and Zoroastrians – call it “prayer”.

It’s what religious people do.

Yes, he was convinced (wrongly) in 2021, as his YouTube videos make evident, that Trump was going to be installed in January as President, even though Biden had officially won the election. 

Yes, he took a small group of his followers to DC in January to pray for Trump and his followers, which is the kind of thing Pentecostals have done for a long time on a routine basis. 

Yes, the same “George Washington ‘Appeal to Heaven Flag’” was adopted in 2019 by the people who run the National Prayer Breakfast, and which was started in 1953, not necessarily because Sheets somehow got to them. 

It is my assumption that Sheets got it from them.

No, Matthew, the inference according to most primers in practical logic is, not, therefore that Dutch Sheets, a fairly simple and humble man, is not in any remote sense the Joker who has been manipulating Alito and plans to rub his hands and cackle while the “Christian nationalists” all run amok as soon as Trump is elected.

I’m kind of curious why the Times, who made myself back in the Eighties every journalist’s authority on the New Age movement, because some of their journos quoted me in prominent cover and magazine feature stories on the subject, swallowed this narrative about Alito.  I know how this works.

And, yes, I did also publish in those days a lot of academic books and articles on the New Age movement as well.

But let’s examine why Taylor is now anointed by the same publication as the new Paul Revere to ride on his high horse and cry out in the night that “the NAR aka the Great Christian Nationalist Conspiracy is coming” before you even wake up the next morning.

According to his own bio Taylor has a book coming out this fall that will supposedly prove such a claim once and for all. The gist of Taylor’s argument is that the NAR practices “spiritual warfare” (something the Apostle Paul commends to all Christian believers in the sixth chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians, which all Pentecostals have practiced since that movement emerged at the start of the twentieth century), and that this entails they are also practicing political warfare.

Such a deduction amounts to the anti-Christian version of the antisemitic blood libel about Jews poisoning wells and murdering Christian children to use their blood for rituals. 

By the way, I myself wrote a book about the NAR back in 2004. I have also come to know a lot of people in the NAR in the intervening years.  They are about as politically mobilized and menacing as the Rotary Club.

As Taylor’s bio indicates, together with his PhD and other minimal publications (mostly op-ed pieces), he is not anything approaching an “expert” on Christianity, let alone American Christianity. He is an expert primarily on Islam, particularly “Muslim-Christian” relations.

So now we know the hidden message behind Alito’s alleged flying of the Pine Tree Flag.  Alito must be allied profoundly and surreptitiously with those dastardly Pentecostal fascists who, like most other evangelicals, voted for Trump.

Wait, Alito’s a traditionalist Catholic, which is about as close to Pentecostalism as Pope Francis is to Billy Sunday.

Never mind.  It’s a conspiracy, because The New York Times says so simply because Matthew Taylor says so.

Stay tuned.