Strike three: WaPost sat on the Alito flag story for more than three years

The U.S. flag code states that the flag is not to be flow upside-down “except as a signal of dire distress in instance of extreme danger to life or property.”

When The New York Times broke the story on May 16th that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had an upside-down American flag flying at his suburban DC home three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, my first question was “why now”? In other words, what had happened to trigger this story, three years late?

The timing of Alito’s flag flying was not trivial.