Can the political left and the right live “peacefully” in this country? Probably not. That’s the mindset of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samual Alito, who got candid with a liberal documentary filmmaker, Lauren Windsor, who posed as a religious conservative and secretly recorded her recent exchange with Alito. “I don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end,” Windsor told Alito at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3. “I think that it’s a matter of, like, winning.” “I think you’re probably right,” Alito responded. “On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.” “People in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that — to return our country to a place of godliness,” Windsor went on. “I agree with you. I agree with you,” Alito responded. Windsor shared her story and recording with Rolling Stone. It comes after a neighbor that his wife has been in a dispute with alleged the justice lied to lawmakers about the timing of an American flag flown upside down at his home. Democrats in Congress asked Alito to recuse himself from cases involving Donald Trump and the failed insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 because the upside down flag — and another flag flown at his beach house — is synonymous with Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs,” Alito told lawmakers in a written response to their request, refusing to recuse himself. “At best, he’s mistaken, but at worst, he’s just outright lying,” Emily Baden told CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront.” After news broke of the flag being flown upside down at their home, reports surfaced of an “Appeal to Heaven” flag — also carried by insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — being flown on a flagpole outside Alito’s home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. The justice rejected calls to step aside from Supreme Court cases involving Trump and Jan. 6 defendants, saying his wife hoisted the two controversial flags that flew above their homes. The Associated Press contributed to this report. https://www.nj.com/politics/2024/06/samuel-alito-caught-candid-on-secret-recording.html
Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America ‘Can’t Be Compromised’ Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living “peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised.” He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to “return our country to a place of godliness.” And Alito offered a blunt assessment of how America’s polarization will ultimately be resolved: “One side or the other is going to win.” Alito made these remarks in conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3, a function that is known to right-wing activists as an opportunity to buttonhole Supreme Court justices. His comments were recorded by Lauren Windsor, a liberal documentary filmmaker. Windsor attended the dinner as a dues-paying member of the society under her real name, along with a colleague. She asked questions of the justice as though she were a religious conservative. The justice’s unguarded comments highlight the degree to which Alito makes little effort to present himself as a neutral umpire calling judicial balls and strikes, but rather as a partisan member of a hard-right judicial faction that’s empowered to make life-altering decisions for every American. The recording, which was provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, captures Windsor approaching Alito at the event and reminding him that they spoke at the same function the year before, when she asked him a question about political polarization. In the intervening year, she tells the justice, her views on the matter had changed. “I don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end,” Windsor says. “I think that it’s a matter of, like, winning.” “I think you’re probably right,” Alito replies. “On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.” Windsor goes on to tell Alito: “People in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that — to return our country to a place of godliness.” “I agree with you. I agree with you,” replies Alito, who authored the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which reversed five decades of settled law and ended a constitutional right to abortion. Similar questions Windsor asked of Chief Justice John Roberts at the same event elicited a far different response. (George W. Bush nominated both men to the Supreme Court in 2005; at the time, Roberts famously used a metaphor of a baseball umpire to describe his judicial philosophy.) In an audio recording of that exchange, Roberts takes issue with Windsor’s assertion that the nation is unusually polarized, historically, citing the high tensions of the Vietnam War era, for example. He also insists that the Supreme Court’s current role is not exceptional. “The idea that the court is in the middle of a lot of tumultuous stuff going on is nothing new,” Roberts says. Pressed on whether the court has an obligation to put the country on a more “moral path,” Roberts turns the tables on his questioner: “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path?” He argues instead: “That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.” Presented with the claim that America is a “Christian nation” and that the Supreme Court should be “guiding us in that path,” Roberts again disagrees, citing the perspectives of “Jewish and Muslim friends,” before asserting, “It’s not our job to do that. It’s our job to decide the cases the best we can.” Although deeply conservative, Roberts now often finds himself outflanked by a far-right, five-justice majority faction — swelled by Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointments — composed of Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Alito’s comments add to the controversy surrounding the conservative justice. Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, have been embroiled in a flap over two flags flown at their residences that have also been adopted by right-wing factions that contest the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 election. The first flag — a U.S. flag flown upside down — is a marker of maximal political distress. It was adopted as a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement that rallied to keep Donald Trump in office, culminating in the riots at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This flag was documented flying at the Alitos’ Virginia home on Jan. 17, 2021, days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The second flag is the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, a Revolutionary War-era banner. The “Appeal to Heaven” language references philosopher John Locke, who argued that, when earthly political appeals are exhausted, men have the right to take up arms and let God sort out the justness of the cause. While the Appeal to Heaven flag was not always controversial, it has been revived by militant Christian nationalists and was also a potent symbol on Jan. 6. This flag was flown at the Alitos’ vacation home in New Jersey in 2023. Democratic congressional leaders cited the displays in calls for Alito to recuse himself from cases involving Jan. 6 defendants, as well as the case to determine whether Trump is immune from prosecution over his efforts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election. Alito rejected the call for recusal in a May 29 letter. He attributed both banners to his wife. “My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not,” he wrote. Alito claimed that the upside down U.S. flag was a response to “a very nasty neighborhood dispute,” and of the Appeal to Heaven flag wrote that neither he nor his wife were aware of “any connection between this historic flag and the ‘Stop the Steal Movement.’” He dismissed any notion that his “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” and declared that he was “duty-bound to reject” the recusal demand. Windsor spoke with Rolling Stone about her decision to attend the event and record her conversation with Alito. “Because the Supreme Court is shrouded in secrecy, and they’re refusing to submit to any accountability in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious ethics breaches, I think that it’s justified to take these types of measures,” she says. (Last year, ProPublica reported that Alito failed to disclose a 2008 private jet flight provided by a billionaire conservative donor with business before the court.) Windsor says she wants to give the public a “window into a body that is increasingly powerful and increasingly willing to overturn precedent.” She has been working on a documentary, Gonzo for Democracy, which will chronicle the growth of Trumpism, election denial, and religious extremism. “One of the main drivers for me in this work is showing Americans that we are at a crossroads: Do we embrace the idea of secular democracy and uphold that tradition, or do we start to transition into a Christian theocracy?” she adds. The Supreme Court Historical Society is a nonprofit organization that collects justices’ writings and other artifacts. Anyone can pay $150 to become a dues-paying member and rub elbows with the court’s nine justices at events like the dinner where Windsor spoke with Alito. (Tickets for the dinner were an extra $500.) The New York Times has reported that, for years, right-wing activists who sought to influence the justices’ views have been encouraged to donate to the organization and use its events as an opportunity to cultivate personal relationships with the jurists. The Rev. Rob Schenck, founder of the evangelical group Faith and Action, told the Times that becoming a member of the society was one tactic he promoted as part of his group’s yearslong campaign to shape conservative justices’ views. (Schenck left the organization in 2018; it is now known as Faith and Liberty and is affiliated with Christian conservative litigation shop Liberty Counsel.) In 2022, Schenck went public about his work at Faith and Action amid an investigation into who leaked an early draft of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade. Schenck sent a letter to Roberts revealing that in 2014, one of Faith and Action’s donors informed him that she had learned the outcome of Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, a decision that ultimately exempted employers from offering insurance coverage for birth control, at a D.C. dinner party hosted by the Alitos weeks before the ruling was released to the public. (Alito denied disclosing the Hobby Lobby decision.) Windsor previously attended the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner last year. In that audio recording, she asks Alito whether he thought the individual who leaked a draft of the Dobbs decision would ever be “ferreted out.” “Well, it’s hard,” Alito says, before taking a long pause. “You can’t name somebody unless you know for sure, and we don’t have the power to do the things that would be necessary to try to figure out — to nail down exactly who did it. That’s the problem. And even then, we might not be able to do it. But we don’t have the power to subpoena people to testify, to subpoena records, phone records, or other things like that. We don’t have the authority, so —” Windsor interjects: “It just seems crazy that you can’t because it’s so detrimental to the trust [that] the public places in the Supreme Court.” “Yeah, well, we’re not a law enforcement agency, you know?” Alito replies briskly. “People have certain rights to privacy. So, law enforcement agencies can issue subpoenas and get search warrants and all that sort of thing, but we can’t do that. So, you know, our marshall, she did as much as she could do. But it was limited.” The identity of the person who leaked the Dobbs decision has never been confirmed. Two theories have emerged about that person’s motivation: that it was a liberal who hoped to ignite a pressure campaign and change the outcome, or that it was a conservative determined to lock the majority in, discouraging any justice who may have harbored doubts about the monumental decision from defecting. Barrett, the Times has reported, initially supported hearing the Dobbs case, then later reversed herself and voted against it, telling Alito it was not the time to consider the issue. Four justices — conservatives Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito — agreed to take the case despite her concerns. Barrett ultimately joined them in overturning the federal right to abortion. Alito has publicly rejected the idea that a conservative would have leaked the opinion he wrote, declaring that the decision’s premature release made the conservative justices “targets of assassination.” https://news.yahoo.com/news/justice-alito-caught-tape-discussing-162333000.html
Glad one of them does. This is not a Christian nation. It is a nation built on the freedom of religion. There are many religions here, as there should be. Some people have forgotten this is supposed to be the land of the free.
the concept is enshrined in the very first freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Known as the establishment clause, the opening lines of the First Amendment ...
It's wild how ignorant they are. It's like they skimmed the textbook and just answered C for every question and this one time it got them a lifetime appointment. Fuck them.
Without a clear separation of church and state you basically end up with another Spanish Inquisition burning pagans at the stake.
Martha-Ann Alito Condemns Pride Flags, the Left, and the Media Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, is incensed about seeing rainbow Pride flags during Pride Month, according to a new recording obtained by Rolling Stone. If it were up to her, she would be flying a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag in response. Or she might design her own flag, one sporting the Italian word for “shame.” In recent weeks, Martha-Ann Alito has been at the center of a national firestorm over two flags seen flying at their residences that have been associated with right-wing movements that question the legitimacy of the results of the 2020 election. Justice Alito has blamed his wife for flying those flags — and rebuffed calls from Democratic lawmakers to recuse himself from upcoming decisions in cases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Like her husband, Mrs. Alito is unbowed by the criticism and controversy — as she makes clear in comments recorded by liberal documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor. Windsor, posing as a Christian conservative, spoke at length with Mrs. Alito at a dinner reception hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society last week. Windsor attended the dinner as a dues-paying member and bought a ticket; a colleague joined her. Rolling Stone first reported on Windsor’s conversation with Justice Alito on Monday. While several outlets have recently relayed stories of Martha-Ann’s tense interactions with neighbors — apparently in response to a sign opposing Donald Trump — Windsor’s recording presents the justice’s wife in her own words. The audio, provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, paints a picture of a right-wing ideologue that matches with the private reputation that Mrs. Alito has developed in the Republican Party and judicial social circuits in the D.C. area and beyond. In the most jarring moment in the recording, Windsor attempts to pose the same prompt that she presented to Justice Alito, about how, in order to take America back to “a godly place,” conservatives need to win. She doesn’t complete the thought before Mrs. Alito starts complaining about having to see rainbow Pride flags in June, Pride month. “You know what I want?” Mrs. Alito says. “I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag, because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.” Referencing her husband, Mrs. Alito says, “He’s like, ‘Oh, please don’t put up a flag.’ I said, ‘I won’t do it because I am deferring to you. But when you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags.’ They’ll be all kinds. I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It’s white and has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word ‘vergogna.’ ‘Vergogna’ in Italian means shame — vergogna. V-E-R-G-O-G-N-A. Vergogna.” “Shame, shame, shame on you,” she adds. (Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority ruled that businesses can discriminate against LGBTQ customers.) In other points of the conversation with Windsor, Martha-Ann Alito agrees there is no negotiating with the radical Left. She claims “the Femnazis believe that [Justice Alito] should control me,” adding: “So they’ll go to hell. He never controls me.” EXCLUSIVE UNDERCOVER AUDIO: Martha-Ann Alito Unfurled "I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month." pic.twitter.com/okNsW7SPlu — Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) June 10, 2024 Mrs. Alito indicates she is spoiling to “get even” by suing the media. When Windsor expresses her sympathies about the recent media coverage about her family, Mrs. Alito responds, “It’s OK. It’s OK, because if they come back to me, I’ll get them. I’m gonna be liberated, and I’m gonna get them.” She adds, “There’s a five-year defamation statute of limitations.” (Most states have a one- or two-year statute of limitations.) Mrs. Alito has a long memory: She complains at length about a Washington Post style section item from two decades ago that critiqued her attire. When Windsor tells Mrs. Alito she is being persecuted and depicted as “a convenient stand-in for anybody who’s religious,” the justice’s wife gets quieter, and her tone turns more serious: “Look at me, look at me. I’m German. I’m from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you. And there will be a way — it doesn’t have to be now — but there will be a way they will know. Don’t worry about it. God — you read the Bible. Psalm 27 is my psalm. Mine. Psalm 27, the Lord is my God and my rock. Of whom shall I be afraid? Nobody.” “I don’t consider Martha-Ann a private figure, given that she’s married to a Supreme Court justice, and she’s a window into his thinking,” Windsor tells Rolling Stone. Windsor buys Justice Alito’s claims that it was Mrs. Alito’s decision to fly the controversial flags at their residences. “She’s very, very enthusiastic about her flag waving,” says Windsor, who has been working on a documentary, “Gonzo for Democracy,” which will chronicle the growth of Trumpism, election denial, and religious extremism. One longtime Republican operative — a fellow partygoer among the conservative elite — tells Rolling Stone that they were personally aware of Mrs. Alito privately cheering on Trump’s public pledge during the 2016 presidential campaign to “open up” U.S. libel laws, so that “we’re going to have people sue you [media outlets] like you’ve never got sued before.” During his term in office, Trump did not follow through on this particular campaign promise, though he is eyeing a possibly broader media crackdown for a potential second administration. Mrs. Alito has for years harbored a disdain and bitterness towards others in the D.C. elite, whom she has bashed for supposedly excluding or shunning her and her husband, and for being too mean about them and their unabashedly conservative beliefs. Sources add that Mrs. Alito also has a longstanding reputation in influential GOP circles for ranting about politics, the culture wars, the Left, and the burning grudges she’s nursed since at least the George W. Bush era. Commenting on the Alito family’s dynamic, a well-connected GOP lawyer says that Justice Alito “is like if you turned National Review into a single person.” Martha-Ann Alito, the lawyer says, “talks like if Breitbart assumed a human vessel … They’re the Washington couple of Donald Trump’s dreams.” https://www.yahoo.com/news/martha-ann-alito-condemns-pride-224621790.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
“Look at me, look at me. I’m German. I’m from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you. And there will be a way — it doesn’t have to be now — but there will be a way they will know. Definitely the strangest line from Mrs. Vergogna here. The fuck does THAT mean?
Sounds to me like backhanded reference to Nazism. Don't show me your rainbow flags, we Germans know how to deal with queers.
I couldn't think of another explanation myself. Purely unhinged. I would call it a dog whistle, but it doesn't seem like she is trying to hide it at all.
She seems to be referring to Nazi Germany. She appears to see it as her heritage, and that there will be a way for it's (the ideology anyway) return in her mind, with the re-election of trump and the rise of the far right. She will use it and other means to strike back against groups and individuals she feels have persecuted her or who stand in opposition to what she believes.
I was afraid of this. It's become all about religion. I am a conservative by nature but fuck religion. The problem is that our population is aging and as people get older more and more become religious. When you're going to die relatively soon you want to believe in the afterlife (whatever it is).
Wasn't a dog whistle. She was among, who she thought was a like minded individual and though her response was very suggestive, she had no concern of attracting a negative response from Lauren.
The problem is people are interchanging their personal beliefs with the constitution, in order to try and create a nation in their image, and not in the image of true freedom as was intended. People should be able to identify as LGBTQ, straight, non sexual or whatever. People should be able to practice Christianity, Judaism, Islam, be a fucking Jedi, etc or practice no religion. Etc etc etc This country is becoming exactly what the colonists escaped from in the first place.
