America’s Priest-Kings

Alito’s Insurrection Flag and the TradCath Supreme Court’s Impunity

“Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” — 28 U.S. Code § 455

Twelve New Yorkers will soon decide Donald Trump’s fate. Under American law, as it stands today, these men and women, his peers, get to decide, based on the evidence presented to them, whether the former president is a felon. This system is what separates America from monarchies and dictatorships. It is admired around the world.

Waiting on their verdict is a good time to check in with the American justice system writ large. It’s not looking good. It would not be an overstatement to say we have an emergency. 

The American law system is becoming increasingly broken in two key ways. The perennial problem, always there but now magnified by Trumpish impunity, is that there’s one legal system for the poor and another for the rich. Trump might well be convicted of felony fraud, but with money for lawyers and appeals, he’s unlikely to face punishment anytime soon, if ever. 

The second crisis is newer and more menacing: the Supreme Court and a swath of the lower federal judiciary have been infiltrated by militant Catholics, trained by Leonard Leo, a knight of the religious Sovereign Military Order of Malta and billionaire dark money purser. 

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is one of Leo’s six Supreme Court judges, nominated by George W. Bush. Alito is also now, ludicrously and arrogantly, arguing that the upside-down American flag, the “insurrection flag,” on the pole in his yard during the 2021 Big Lie violence was actually hung by his wife and he had nothing to do with it. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The New York Times, which got its hands on a photograph of the banner. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

A half dozen of Alito’s neighbors in suburban Washington and an unknown number of other people have known for three years about the jurist’s outrageous political statement, but only now did someone drop a dime to the paper of record. They “requested anonymity because they said they did not want to add to the contentiousness on the block and feared reprisal,” wrote journalist Jodi Kantor. 

Alito is a man of immense power, the American pseudo-priest turned Supreme Court Justice who set women’s health care on a course back into the Stone Age. He is now openly aligned with the Big Lie insurrectionists and yet refuses to recuse himself from ruling on the Trump presidential immunity claim - a case with profound implications for the future of American democracy. 

Alito’s SCOTUS crony Clarence Thomas is similarly conflicted. His wife Ginni has been an activist comrade of Leonard Leo for years. Last year, the Washington Post reported on documents showing Leo funneled money to Ginny Thomas via Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway as early as 2012.  Leo told Kellyanne Conway to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” emphasizing that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

More recently, Ginni’s connections to the 2021 coup attempt have come into public view in dribs and drabs. Among other escapades, she was reportedly mobbed up with the fake elector schemers in Arizona, where the state attorney general has just indicted dozens of MAGA plotters including Rudy Giuliani. 

Thomas and Alito are both known to have taken luxury vacations paid for by a Texas moneybags, Harlan Crow. Their political engagement or that of their wives puts them clearly in violation of federal law which requires judges to step aside in cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” They have no plans to do so.

And apparently, there isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it. 

Chief Justice John Roberts - the now most moderate conservative on the court - has a lifetime gig and appears to be in no hurry to police his fellow judges, all of whom are political and spiritual brethren. Roberts’ 2005 nomination was also shepherded through the Senate with the help of Leonard Leo. The anti-abortion fanatics were initially concerned about the relative stiffness of Chief Justice Roberts’ spine against abortion, but those fears were allayed because of his lawyer wife Jane’s position as board member and executive vice president of Feminists for Life, a nonprofit anti-abortion group aiming to "make abortion unthinkable.” She no longer publicly serves the zygote wing but has moved on to bigger and better, raking in more than $10 million in legal fees from firms with cases during her husband’s tenure. 

Where are the leaders? The U.S. Senate has oversight on the Supreme Court. Senators vet and vote on nominees and hold power of the purse over the court. Democrats have a thin majority in the Senate. But they have no plan, no strategy, and are utterly helpless. The Biden White House, with all its power to send weapons abroad and promulgate executive orders at home, is equally neutralized.

Meanwhile, Republicans - the minority party - play hardball and win. The Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee has tried to subpoena Leo, Crow, and Chief Justice Roberts. Republicans won’t have it. Late last year they walked out of a committee hearing to deny Democrats a quorum rather than vote on subpoenas of Crow and Leo. In the weeks preceding the vote, Sen. Lindsay Graham, the ranking minority member, threatened “a shit show” if Democrats tried to haul their big donors in. Republicans offered 170 procedural amendments to the subpoenas to throw sand in the gears of the process. The approval of the subpoenas was “largely symbolic” anyway since to enforce them would require 60 votes on the Senate floor. In other words, these proceedings were mostly messaging, rather than accountability, and Democrats were still unable to do it.

Crow, Leo, and the Chief Justice have refused to honor the subpoenas. Ground down by the games, Senate Democrats have apparently given up. When asked about Alito’s insurrection flag a few days ago, Committee Chairman Dick Durbin responded with notable defeat: Durbin told reporters he doesn’t plan to hold a hearing on it because he “[doesn’t] think there’s much to be gained with a hearing at this point.” 

Durbin also said that if Alito refuses to recuse from cases involving Trump, “[t]here’s no recourse other than impeachment, and we’re not at that point at all.”

But, we never get to “that point.” The upside-down flag did prompt the New York Times to run an op-ed accusing the high court of having “no shame.” While the Times op-ed page simmers, activists fulminate and let-off steam. Accountability.US, a court ethics watchdog, released a statement: “Our democracy depends on reining in the Court’s MAGA justices and their contempt for the American people. … The assertion from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that investigations into clear judicial wrongdoing don’t matter is, frankly, bizarre.”

Bizarre is the right word. The real emergency in our legal system is the militant Catholic takeover of the federal court system, led by Leonard Leo, K Street’s Knight of Malta. Leo has been beavering away on this project for decades but is now emboldened to new heights or depths of influence-buying and judge-seating by an outrageous $1.6 billion dark money bequest I wrote about for The New Republic last year. Millions from that bottomless pile have been funneled into the Project 2025 plan to use a second Trump term to institute a full-scale assault on American civil rights, including privacy, and on democracy in general.

For years, Christian nationalists have been caricatured as Protestant hayseeds from below the Mason-Dixon line who move in electoral blocs via their megachurches and blow their Saturday paychecks frolicking in Biblical theme parks where dinosaurs co-existed with humans. 

But the intellectual underpinning to the current enterprise, the one that hierophant Alito is working at, has little to do with Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell. It’s Catholic integralism, a radically regressive, anti-science, pro-monarchist concept of re-ordering society, advocated by serious people like Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule. They write about America as the new Rome, in need of a similarly Papal, patriarchal spiritual leadership. As ancient Rome fell, the Catholic church stepped in to run the state, and for centuries, Popes chose kings across Europe where the Church was the higher authority. 

The Christian soldiers with real money and influence in Washington and on the federal courts are of that stock — quietly devoted to restoring a modern form of medieval theocracy in 21st-century America. 

Culturally, trad-Catholics have made some inroads with the younger generation. Kansas City kicker Harrison Butker’s widely ridiculed commencement speech urging female graduates to choose a kitchen, a baby, and a bed with a man over their own careers and lives, is a 28-year-old tradCath. The sect is even enjoying a Fashy-fascist trend moment among downtown NYC hipsters like the Red Scare girl podcasters who “joke” about how menstruating women should be barred from going to work. They all proclaim a preference for the Latin mass and a longing for some vestige of classy medievalism. 

Washington’s militant Catholics, like Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, make alliances with European fascists. As the Project 2025 paves the way for Trump to get legal revenge on his opponents, the movement appears increasingly possessed by fantasies of the Spanish Inquisition when heretics could be forced to profess faith or face the consequences. 

Is there room in their worldview for witch belief? Of course. Alito, in his draft opinion in the Dobbs case, invoked “eminent common-law authorities,” including 17th-century British witch-hunting jurist Matthew Hale, to show how abortion was viewed historically as a criminal act. “Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale likewise described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision,’” Alito wrote. Hale was such a friend to women that he presided over a 1662 trial in which two young girls were convicted of witchcraft and hanged, and his writing established two precedents that would later be used during the Salem witch trials. 

Even before Dobbs, the Supreme Court majority was dabbling in abandoning Enlightenment ideals related to science, most notoriously allowing (in the 2014 Hobby Lobby contraceptive coverage case) misogynists who believe the primary purpose of the female sex is to breed more babies to refuse to follow federal law and sell or prescribe contraceptives. As Jill Filipovic wrote about the case recently in Time, the decision was probably most shocking for giving rights to people based on how they “feel” about science, as opposed to medical reality. 

The ultimate aim of the tradCaths wielding the sword of the Lord against American liberalism is to time travel American society back to some era before the Enlightenment, before the scientific method and reason replaced ignorance, superstition. 

Their aim is deeply, profoundly unAmerican. 

Many of the American founders, as well as their supportive counterparts in 18th-century Europe, were pre-modern scientists. They put their faith into the American democratic experiment because they saw this new form of egalitarian government as a way to “increase and diffuse knowledge among men” (as British chemist and American institutional benefactor James Smithson, about whom I wrote a book, put it).

The new medievalists like some of the improvements that reason and science brought to modernity - for sure, their smartphones and (luxury, private) air travel and nuclear medicine like CT scans. But they loathe and fear the social restructuring that this knowledge brought, especially the unprecedented power that science and medicine granted to women over their bodies, and by extension, over their lives. 

Right now, the American priest kings are ascendant. The American people are, at this moment, utterly unprotected by ineffectual, hamstrung leaders and at the mercy of the sort of regressive fanatics we associate with nations where women don’t have even the most basic fundamental freedoms.. 

Ben Franklin is rolling over in his grave.