The latest piece of what Democratic strategist James Carville admits is “spaghetti” thrown at the wall comes in the form of demands that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recuse himself from key January 6 and election cases because his wife flew a couple of flags from their home.

No, they weren’t Nazi flags, Confederate flags, or even Republican flags. One was an American flag turned upside down — a symbol ship captains have used for more than a hundred years to signify “distress” — and the other was a historic flag of Massachusetts patriots’ navy in the Revolutionary War, which a few election-integrity protestors also flew on January 6, 2021. (Many of them also wore wedding rings — I guess Democrats will demand we dispense with those as well.)

We have good reason to feel confident that Alito will not cave to the Democrats’ demands. This is the man who was willing to face down the most bloodthirsty demons from the very pit of Hell and write the majority opinion exposing Roe v. Wade as a conscious, slipshod fraud. In our times of raging mobs and assassination attempts on justices like Brett Kavanaugh, that shows moral courage of a very high order.

Alito Has Looked into the Heart of Darkness: Roe v. Wade

The ordeal also must have proven educational. I doubt that, before he did the exhaustive research to write his ruling, even Alito realized what a house of cursed Tarot cards the Court’s pro-abortion precedents really were. I can imagine him poring over lawbooks, looking puzzled, asking himself aloud, “Is that all there is? These tissues of lies and jerry-rigged boobytraps of wishful speculation were all that my predecessors on the Court relied on?”

Alito must at some point have realized, with a cold chill down his spine: No, they weren’t mistaken or confused. They weren’t stupid. They were lying, in service of killing kids for sexual convenience.

No, Alito’s not going to cave. So why is the Left even trying this course of action against him?

First of all because they cannot help themselves. They’re not steering the car at this point. The Gadarene autopilot took over, and it drives them to back Hamas against Israeli hostages, quack doctors who castrate children against their parents, and hordes of illegal invaders against American citizens.

But there’s also a rational explanation for why Democrat congressmen and elite media figures are making the outrageous demand that Alito recuse himself over his wife’s constitutional speech, but not that Judge Juan Merchan recuse himself from former President Donald Trump’s New York trial over his daughter’s massive Democrat campaign cash-grab.

History tells them that more than half the time, when they make insane demands such as these, Republicans give in. They pretend that we’re still living in 1960, with anti-Communist patriot John F. Kennedy challenging anti-Communist patriot Richard Nixon over who would do a better job of defending our Constitution. While often citing high-minded principles as their pretexts, these “conservatives” show themselves to be men of straw with spines of glass and squishy, gangrenous centers. They prove that they care more about what elites might say about them than about what actually happens to their helpless fellow citizens — born or unborn. Their much-vaunted “faith” and “patriotism” turns out to be cheap electroplate rather than solid gold — 24 karat and not even a millimeter deep.

Going Out and Losing to the Globetrotters, Every Single Game

The Left can look back and see a long, miserable list of instances where supposedly solid conservatives collapsed at the first breath of wind, like the Maginot Line in 1940 when the Nazis rolled into France:

• Unpopular governor and religious liberty quisling Mike Pence, who tricked Donald Trump into firing General Michael Flynn in cooperation with corrupt Deep State officials who were ginning up the Russia Collusion hoax. Then Pence promised Trump he’d challenge electors from states where flagrant election fraud was credibly charged, but courts refused to hear the cases on their merits — and on January 6 betrayed his word while Trump was still giving his speech urging “peaceful and patriotic” protest. Pence still preens that he “chose the Constitution” over Trump, but the fact is he chose the Establishment over our country.
• Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who cluelessly recused himself from the Russia Collusion witch-hunt, thereby wrecking Trump’s first term in office with a media circus based on disinformation and slander, landing several innocent Americans in prison.
• Republican congressmen who refuse to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for presiding over a lawless mass invasion of our country, with illegal immigrants entering over the past three years who outnumber the population of 36 U.S. states — and Democrats making obvious moves to allow them to vote illegally.
• House Speaker Mike Johnson, who threw away the “power of the purse” which our Founders gave his legislative body — not only fully funding the FBI persecution of pro-lifers and conservative Christians, but building the feds a shiny new headquarters from which to do it.
• Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Even as Democrats shred law after law trying to keep Trump off state ballots, DeWine is calling a special session to make sure that Biden stays on Ohio’s after failing to follow Ohio election law.

We could go on all day. If we want to be overly charitable, we could say that such Republicans are stuck in some Norman Rockwell picture of the past. Or that they’re merely cowards, or clueless. That’s less unsettling than allowing ourselves to suspect they don’t even want to win, that they’re consciously playing the role of a “controlled opposition” who know that their job is to go out and lose gracefully to the Globetrotters, every single time.

Your Loyalty Oath to Hitler Isn’t Morally Binding

In Eric Metaxas’s 2009 biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he recounts that pastor’s frustration with Prussian officers in the Wehrmacht who claimed to be appalled at Hitler’s crimes. They knew he was leading their beloved country to ruin, but wouldn’t take action against him because they’d sworn personal oaths of loyalty to the Führer. They put the fetish of their “honor” over the lives of millions, or so they told themselves. They were also protecting their skins, avoiding the moral duty to do something dangerous to save the innocent.

Nowadays, nobody talks about “honor” of that sort. Instead, they polish idols like “civility,” “norms” and “principles.”

But we’re not fooled, and neither is Jesus Christ, Judge of nations.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.